Now there arose in Egypt a pharaoh who knew not Joseph. Somehow the ominous tone of the King James language gives a bit more gravity to the moment of the text. The first seven verses of Exodus tell us that all the promises of the Genesis were panning out. God was blessing the world through the children of Abraham. Egypt had it good because of Israel’s boy, Joseph, and his multiplying kin. They may have been resident aliens in Egypt, but they were doing right well: settling down, having babies, running carpool in minivans — the usual sort of things. God had been on his game in working things out to rescue his people when famine struck. But since the whole human predicament is an up and down affair, things were sure to change sooner or later.

Now four hundred plus years have passed in Egypt and there’s a new sheriff in town. In the ancient Near East, unless this new king were of the same dynasty as the previous one, heads were sure to roll just so he could establish his own authority. I’m not sure there’s much difference in American culture today. When a new CEO comes in from the outside, everyone starts polishing the resume. When a new manager or head coach is named, all the assistants get nervous. When a new principal is appointed, the assistant principals start looking over their shoulders to see if she is looking over theirs. It’s human nature. The new boss wants a team he can trust; he wants his own Josephs, and he isn’t sure you are one of them. Underlings, for their part, all think they have proved Joseph loyalty and they jockey for their place at the table or in the kingdom. There’s nothing wrong with it all as long as people are not treated unjustly. They usually are.

Well, this pharaoh made an 800 on the math portion of the SAT but flunked the critical reasoning section altogether. He counted the Hebrews and realized there were more of them than Egyptians. Even though he had the power and they didn’t, who could say it would always be like that? And we all know that the first order of business for every politician is to stay in power. He stupidly figured something had to be done to prevent those people from rushing the palace. Let us deal shrewdly with them, he says. Which is roughly the opposite of saying, Let us deal fairly with them.

His first shrewd move is to enslave the Hebrews and put them under a heavy burden of forced labor. That backfires quickly as it sends the Hebrew women folk into unexpected labor. Sure Pharaoh gets his building and monument erections: his cities, his phallic-symbol obelisks, and whatnot. But anytime a man has to enslave another or put down an employee or slap around a woman, all he does is prove his own impotence. God sides with the oppressed Hebrews and gives them power, not only to bear up under persecution, but further to bear more children, which only furthers the threat to Egypt. What an ironic God we have! The thing shrewd Pharaoh fears is the birth rate of the Hebrews, but his power moves end up spiking their Gatorade with Viagra. You’ve got to love the Bible.

Plan B is to kill all the male children just as they are born. As if his biggest threat would come from the men! If I am casting Pharaoh in the remake, I go with Ray Romano instead of Yul Brynner. It’s like he never gets it about women. This time he enlists the midwives of the Hebrews to do his dirty work for him. As if these women — whose whole being is centered round bring life into being — would cooperate with him in putting life to death! They didn’t need to wait for Hippocrates to come along to know that their first duty was to "do no harm." It not only violates their professional ethics, it violates their womanly code — the first rule of which is, "put people before programs." Imagine the church without women? We’d run with cold precision and precision coldnesss; and we’d be severely undermanned, don’t you know?! So for the record, womenfolk, thank you.

Now, we don’t actually know whether these two women Pharaoh enlists are Hebrews or Egyptians. The names are Hebrew, but either way they are heroines worthy of notice. Notice we don’t catch the name of the pharaoh. That would have killed him, not to have his eminence properly acknowledged. But we do get the names of two women who would have been nobodies even in their own communities because of their inability to have children. After this, they do, because God rewards them with their own families. Shiphrah and Puah. Say their names with me to give them proper honor: Shiphrah and Puah.

Like a Flannery O’Connor short story, every small detail matters, including names and no-names. The point is that God notices us all, no matter who we are or where. God wants us to understand that we all have power, even if we feel nameless and faceless in the face of the named powers of this world. For one thing, we all have the power to choose. No one can deny us the most fundamental choices that God has given to us — choices of conscience: Whom shall we serve? Will we live for ourselves or for others? How will we respond to the things that are done to us?

Shiphrah and Puah defy the king. They lie for God’s sake for life’s sake. They make up a cockamamie story about Hebrew women just spitting their babies out so fast the midwives can’t get there in time. Now any woman knows what a load of patosin that is. But I’ve stood dumbfounded in three delivery rooms myself, understanding little, and I’ve seen scores of equally dumbstruck men working on their shallow breathing while their wives are doing the heavy lifting of delivering life to the world. So it doesn’t surprise me that male Pharaoh and shrewd actually bought it, this story; to wit, the half-wit king was outwitted by two witty women. You’ve got to love the Bible.

Unfortunately, stories of oppression and humiliation of women and children are as current as ever. Two news stories caught my attention this week. A high court in Nigerian upheld a lower court ruling that a single mother who had a child out of wedlock will be stoned to death as soon as the baby is weaned. The Islamic legal system of Shariah has been installed in certain parts of that country, and the people are cheering the strict morality it imposes. Of course, the father is not held equally accountable for the offense. Then in Florida now, the law requires that if a woman wants to have her child adopted by a man other than the biological father, and if she cannot locate him or will not, or if she doesn’t know who the father is, she has to take out a four-day newspaper ad listing the names of any and all men she had relations with about the time of conception. They want to prevent lawsuits from biological fathers after adoption, but I’m thinking, oh sure, that’ll do the trick. Shaming women and children, and harming other families by these revelations. Shrewd, very shrewd.

What we learn from Shiphrah and Puah is how properly to tame the shrewd. Sometimes some things are better left private in the service of human life and dignity. The women perform civil disobedience in the face of uncivil laws. No names named.

Christians in Nigeria are rising up in protest against the stoning ruling, because we have another law that guides us — the one Jesus gave the day he stopped the stoning of woman caught in adultery. Let those who are without sin cast the first stone. God is on the side of life, not death.

My colleague Glen Schmucker is preaching this morning on the gospel lesson. Jesus says the gates of Hades shall not prevail against the church. Glen picked up on something subtle but powerful here. He rightly sees that Jesus does not say the church is a fortress under attack from marauding powers of hell, and that the walls will hold until the Second Coming when all will be well. Jesus says the powers of hell are strong; they are constantly trying to turn gardens into cemeteries. The oppressive, dehumanizing powers of this world try to keep people locked up behind gates of silence and inaction. They drain the spirit out of people and turn them into the walking dead. The church has the keys to those gates and the gates shall not prevail against the power of resurrection life. We are on the offensive, not the defensive, and the world is on notice. We are armed with weapons of forgiveness and mercy and love and justice. And we are organized against unforgiveness, cruelty, hunger, oppression, abuse, and every form of hate. The church is a virus for which hell has no vaccine. The love of God is tames the shrewd and defeats every death-dealing pharaoh.

Well, the story continues with more women out-shrewding Pharaoh. Shrewd Pharaoh issues Genocide Plan C. Now every male Hebrew baby under the age of two will be found and thrown into the Nile. By this time, Pharaoh has been so outwitted he has lost sight of his economy. The labor pool will suffer from lack of men a few years hence, but all he wants now is to win.

A woman bears a baby boy and cannot bear to drown him in the river, no matter what the law says and no matter what her neighbors tell her could happen to all of them if she disobeys the king. She schemes up a baptism motif and willingly gives him up to God’s keeping. She makes a smallish Noah’s ark out of his bassinet, and sets him afloat in the river, with his sister keeping watch. The boy floats right into the bathing pool of Pharaoh’s daughter. Imagine that! She draws him out of the bulrushes and names him Moses, an Egyptian word for son, but a Hebrew homonym for "one who draws out." And sure enough he would grow into a son of God more than a son of Pharaoh, and he would draw out his people from the river of death to life on the other side of the Red Sea. To top it all off, Moses’ mother gets to be the wet-nurse for the boy and gets paid for it, as if she is really only the princess’s surrogate. You’ve got to love the Bible!

When we parents dedicate our children to the Lord we say what the infant baptizing churches say about them: we give them up to the God’s safe care, knowing that we cannot hold them without causing the death of them. We know that the only chance they have for life is resurrection, not success. We commit to letting go of them to God every day, and trusting that God will deliver them from death to life, just as God delivered Moses into the safekeeping of Pharaoh’s daughter.

Some of you have sent off your little ones to school for the first time this week, and I am sending off my firstborn going off to college. One of my friends was good enough to e-mail my usual words baby dedication words. Things like: This child does not belong to you, she belongs to God, and you are only a steward of her life for a time. It was a reminder that I’ve been practicing for this moment for a long time. Thank you very much.

Listen, here’s what I know: God has a life-wish for the world. And no shrewd, impotent potentate can tame resurrection power. God has the last word and the church gets to speak it — that word is life.